


Ghost in the Machine

by voidknight



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Character Study, Existential Angst, Existentialism, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Hospitals, Identity Issues, Philosophy, Post-Canon, Recovery, Sensory Processing Disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:27:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26165635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidknight/pseuds/voidknight
Summary: Alphonse gets used to having a body again.Or: in which even getting your dearest wish granted can leave one with complicated feelings.
Relationships: Alphonse Elric & Edward Elric
Comments: 12
Kudos: 75





	Ghost in the Machine

**Author's Note:**

> got emotional about the ending of fmab again so i wrote this :)
> 
> i love alphonse, and i especially love how he gives me an excuse to write even more fics tagged with "existential angst" and "identity issues." is that becoming my brand? maybe so...

Notes on the resuscitation of Alphonse Elric:

Part one: he’s alive, and that’s enough for now.

Even though he seems to float as light as dust on a breeze, a body that weighs almost nothing compared to what he knows so well. The way he stumbles into reality with nothing but his skin and his heartbeat and a buzzing in his head and the firm flesh of his brother’s arm wrapped around him. He feels each pore in the fabric. Each blade of grass stabs his back.

And he smiles with his mouth, this time.

Funny, that he can remember how to speak, push words from his brain to his lips and watch the muscles dance in time. That he can reach out a hand and experience the warmth that comes with contact.

* * *

Alphonse is not sure how long he spends in the hospital. It feels like days. It’s probably longer. It’s hard to say when the cycle of waking and sleeping and dreaming feels so foreign to him. Dreams knit themselves from the threads of memory, and he often wakes with a cry, unsure of what relation the conjured images have to the reality he lives in.

What existential horror does a dream hold? The answer is not so simple:

1\. No matter how naturally sleep may come to him—and how much he revels in that feeling, of letting the blissful state take him over—the fact is that he has not slept in many years. Simply being tired feels like a new sensation.

(Tiredness pervades too many of his waking hours, nowadays. He’s told he will be more tired than normal until he recovers. Normal? There is no normal. He was never this tired as a child. He doesn’t like the new fuzziness at the corners of his brain.)

2\. Alphonse has a nagging feeling that these dreams are woven from someone else’s memories.

He tries very hard not to think about that.

* * *

Food is… good. Food is amazing, actually. Once he gets off the IV and stops feeling nauseous every time he even thinks of putting something in his stomach, he calls Ed and tells him to find him an apple pie. Ed wastes no time in doing so, of course. He watches eagerly as his brother nibbles at the pastry, bliss overtaking his face. He can’t finish it, but it’s okay. There’s always next time.

(If he’s lucky,  _ next time _ will be with Winry.)

And touch is good, too. Ed will come in and hold Al’s hand for hours, even while he sleeps. He always uses his right hand, the one that also hasn’t had human contact in far too long. Sometimes the other patients will visit—Colonel Mustang and Riza Hawkeye most frequently—and they’ll also sit and hold hands with Al or touch his shoulder or arm to show him that they’re  _ here. _ And he’s here too. He’s here, maybe more  _ here _ than he’s ever been.

* * *

Part two: he’s different, now, and it’s strange.

Alphonse simultaneously feels too large and too small. When he imagines himself interacting with his friends, he always does so from the vantage point of someone much taller, looking down at the tops of their heads. Now, as he practices walking on shaky legs, he faces them eye-to-eye, and it’s… it’s nice.

And yet he is also too much of something, sometimes. He is a being of limbs that cannot be broken and reattached, and a belly that is not hollow and could not hold anything but pulpy food matter. He can’t see inside himself anymore, and in a way that’s a little scary. He is no longer… simple. A mask, a shell for a Real Person to slip inside. Before, he knew every inch of his own anatomy, and now—

Perhaps that unknowable nature is exciting?

Perhaps his fragility is that of a bird that emerges, naked and shivering, from its pure white egg. It’s just a symptom of his own mortality. (And he’s only fourteen, after all. He will get stronger—and then he will be able to protect his friends and family.)

But skin could never emulate the solidity of metal. He has traded the nutshell for the meat within, and though he is no longer the king of infinite space, maybe he doesn’t have to be.

* * *

“Ed?”

“Hmm?”

“Could you keep the lights off?”

“Oh, eyes still adjusting?”

“I think so,” says Al.

—But simply  _ adjusting _ shouldn’t take this long, should it? Especially considering his circumstances. His body sat for years on end in a pure white room; he should have no issue with brightness. Well… it’s not brightness, but  _ brightness— _ hospital lights and the sun and things that blind.

He sits on the deck in the sun after that, and though it leaves spots in his vision, the warmth presses on his skin like a thin blanket, and it is worth it. He missed the sun. Sunlight is much better for skin than it is for metal.

(The doctors praise him for being conscientious about his Vitamin D intake. There’s an added benefit right there, thinks Al, though it hadn’t been his intention.)

* * *

“Ed, could you cut my hair?”

“Come on, you don’t want to leave it long this time?”

“It itches,” says Al, which is the simplest way he can think of to articulate  _ I can feel every strand against my neck and it is ever-present in my mind as a source of sensory stimulation. _

“Long hair is cooler.”

“It does look good on you! But that’s not what I want.”

“Alright,” sighs Ed, and grabs hold of the spoon from Alphonse’s lunch. He’s about to clap his hands together when he remembers, and a disappointed scowl forms on his face.

“I’ll do it,” Al says brightly, and in a flash the spoon has become a pair of scissors.

Ed climbs onto the bed while his brother shifts to the edge, settling into a better position. Al has half a mind to wait a little while, see if he can get a better hairdresser. But at least Ed can help him relieve the pain a bit, in a way he can’t do himself while he can barely stand in front of a mirror.

“I’d just like it to be away from my neck and eyes,” Al requests.

And so his brother presses the cool metal of the scissors to the back of his neck, and carefully snips away, catching every last scrap of hair. Al ends up with something like a bob cut, which doesn’t exactly suit him, but it works, for now.

* * *

“Ed, could you close the window?”

“Too cold?” says Ed, rising from his seat.

“No, it’s—I’m not sure I like that bird squawking very much.”

“Huh.” The window drops shut with a soft bang, and the sound is, mercifully, muffled. “I hadn’t even noticed.”

Al smiles. “I think my ears have gotten too sensitive.”

“How does that work? You could hear things just as well when you were in the armor, right?”

“Yes, but it’s… it’s different when you have a body. Sounds have to go through your brain. They don’t just… magically appear in your awareness. And I think my brain is a little confused.”

Ed shrugs and plops back down in his chair. “I don’t blame you. Crows are annoying.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. A repetitive noise can be—annoying. Stabbing, throbbing, burrowing. Funny words to use for a thing that isn’t even  _ there. _ Vibrations in the air. Then again, he’s discovered that the intangible can often hurt much more.

* * *

Part three: he wonders when he is going to get better.

He walks with a cane and that’s okay. He can move. He’s patient. He’s building his muscles back and that takes time, of course. It’s going to be a while before he can learn to kick and punch again, but that’s fine—thank goodness he doesn’t need to anymore.

Then why are coarse fabric and too-hot bathwater and close-cropped blades of grass still sources of irritation? His skin isn’t tender or raw. But gaining back a sense of touch means mixing all of the good with all of the bad, and in his case, the good feels even better and the bad feels even worse.

* * *

Perhaps the more pressing question is: when is he going to start feeling like a person again?

Alphonse would like to think of himself as fairly well-read, for a teenager. One of the books that he’d stumbled upon soon after losing his body was a compilation of various philosophical texts, ruminating on the nature of consciousness. Where does it come from? Must it arise from a physical brain? What is the difference between a set of subjective experiences and the entity we call our  _ self? _

Of course, this had sent Al into a bit of an existential panic, and he’d made Ed read it over with him to make sure he was interpreting it correctly. Ed had had a good laugh over the whole thing, ripping the text to shreds for its outdated nature (“of course consciousness can exist outside of a brain!”), but the concepts described therein had already lodged themselves in Al’s mind. Physicalism versus dualism, whatever that meant. Body versus soul.

For a while, memories were all he had to assure himself of his identity. It’s a shaky place to stand, even if his brother backed him up all the way. At least he wasn’t alone; at least he had someone to fight him on the balcony of a hospital and drive through his skull the fact that his entire childhood couldn’t have been a fabrication.

And yes, he knows that he  _ is _ a person—has been for fourteen whole years, awake and kicking—but some things simply don’t add up.

Right now, he can’t help thinking about the way that he watched his own body stand at the Gate of Truth, how it spoke with his voice and moved with a subdued version of his mannerisms, and—doesn’t that just go to show that mind and body can never truly be separate? It’s a strange thing, considering his body without him. Had it given rise to a new consciousness? Had he left a bit of his own soul in there to pilot it? His memories of sitting before the Gate are vague at best—was it really  _ him _ there?

(It’s hard to say. It’s like something he watched once on a screen: flickering images of ceaseless blankness, interrupted once by his brother’s second foray into the realm of Truth. Grasping hands and a shout and a promise.)

It feels so  _ wrong, _ to say that his body had a mind of its own while he was away. Maybe it was a zombie: a being that behaved according to the wiring in its brain, but had no real  _ thought, _ no spark of life that made it truly conscious. Like what had happened to Barry.

And where does that all leave him? He’s whole again, and though that’s a wonderful thing, he also feels as if he’s just been remade for the third time. He is not the same person that pressed his chalk-stained hands to the ground before a forbidden transmutation circle and prayed that his mother would return. And he is also not the same person who lived for years in a suit of armor, watching other people eat, waiting out each long night. He’s something entirely new.

* * *

It’s Riza Hawkeye, actually, who finds him crying in the hallway after midnight, listening to the way the sounds coming from his throat echo softly around the building in all the wrong sorts of ways.

“Alphonse? Is something wrong?”

He came down from his room to get a snack but he forgot to bring his cane and he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to make it up the stairs again. But he doesn’t say that.

“Am I still Alphonse?” he chokes out. His voice is too high, too one-dimensional, name unfamiliar on lips that have not been used in years. “Am I still me?”

“Of course you are,” says Riza, and offers him a hand. It’s warm, and Al can feel every callus as it brushes against his own too-smooth skin.

“But I feel—” Words slip around in his brain like fish in a bucket. “New, and r-raw, and—like wet clay. Like… something different.”

“I think we’re all feeling a little bit like that at the moment.”

He looks up at her, clinging to her arm as he rises onto unsteady feet. “Everyone? Really?”

“The world ended, didn’t it? And then it restarted. And then we won.” She gazes off down the hall, her grip on him staying strong even as her eyes unfocus. “I’m sorry—it’s late, and I don’t know if this is what you want to hear right now. But I’ve been thinking about all the rebuilding we’re going to be needing to do. You’re not the only person who’s been turned into something new.”

“Metaphorically?”

Riza nods, just once. “I know that it isn’t the same thing. But I hope you know that it isn’t bad to… to recreate oneself. You’re strong. I know you can do it.”

Her lips turn upwards, and in her tired smile, he sees more hope than he would have imagined.

“Now,” she continues, “is there anything I can help you with?”

“O-oh. If it’s not too much trouble… would you help me up the stairs?”

“Of course, Al. No trouble at all.”


End file.
